this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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So rather than start paying the volunteer moderators that keep their site running, Reddit is going to pay the repost bots and low-effort karma farmers? Surely that will improve the quality of content on the site... /s
Yea ... all around, it's looking more and more likely that big social may become something rather embarrassing and dystopian.
The best reason I can think of for why big social is going to die is that it was born out of a particular economic environment that either inaccurately assessed the technological-financial situation or just doesn't exist anymore. Namely, that having a bunch of users on your platform and the data that follows will always magically just produce a profitable business model such that blindly investing in such a business is an obvious move.
I'm guessing that big social just isn't that profitable, or is only profitable at the sort of mega monopoly level that facebook and google operate at, but even then risks fading over time due to how social spaces are generational. And that the belief that big social was super profitable was born out of a vague big data web2.0, that convinced itself it had found the new oil.
Beyond that, throwing VC cash at big-data businesses may just not be something anyone believes in any more, partly because of the above, and partly, I'm wondering, because the power of actually creating new technology and new types of platforms has always been a bigger business prospect and AI and chatGPT has basically forced the tech world to remember that.
If I'm on to something, the awkward thing for Twitter and Reddit is that their finances and corporate structures are probably bound up in the older presumptions and have no choice but to do their best to return on the promised profits, however dumb they look, while the rest of us can easily and happily move on, because that's what the internet is fundamentally about.
Facebook/IG have certainly made a ton of money. Twitter and reddit haven’t I believe because they’ve been less aggressive about monetizing their data, and having a site with content attractive to advertisers. This also attracted users who were on Twitter or reddit because they weren’t doing what FB does, which I guess makes it difficult to increase monetization.
Spez is following twitter's playbook down to the letter. Aren't twitter just starting to enable revenue sharing program with their most popular users?
It seems like Twitter was basically copying YouTube, which sort of makes sense (Instagram and TikTok also pay people) but I get the impression reddit is mainly copying Twitter.
Spez mentioned he thought Twitter was doing great and wanted to emulate them, which is confusing considering nothing they’ve done has been popular or successful. Mark Zuckerberg said he also was impressed, but with recent events, I think he was psychologically tricking musk, like “you’re doing great! Just keep doing that!”.
And all that after killing any automated moderation that utilized public API
The amout of shooting themselves in the leg is through the roof